19yo ignores severe pain as constipation, then she sees ‘something that was not supposed to be there.’ But the problem continues to get ‘bigger’

Pain as a symptom can sometimes make you overlook a much bigger problem in your body. Elizabeth Langlais, a 19-year-old student going through college, had to learn that the hard way.

A pain near her appendix started bothering Langlais, and within days, it was bad enough that walking became difficult. Her roommates urged her to go to the hospital, and she figured the problem was her appendix.

“This pain is so bad, I cannot move,” she recalled telling them, per the report by People magazine. An X-ray pointed somewhere less dramatic, however. According to the doctors, she was badly constipated, and they sent her home with laxatives. The doctor also raised the option of an ultrasound if she was willing to wait for it, but she had class in the morning and left.

During the summer, she went home to Rhode Island but the symptoms followed. At a routine June checkup, she mentioned she was still swelling up and her doctor ordered a second X-ray and prescribed another laxative. By the follow-up appointment, the bloating had stopped coming and going. Her stomach had gone completely hard, and lying flat made the problem visible because one side sat higher than the other.

“You could see that there was something that was not supposed to be there,” she told People. Her doctor floated a blockage as the explanation and this time, they actually scanned her.

The ultrasound turned up a mass measuring more than 20 centimeters, or close to eight inches. Doctors didn’t rule out cancer immediately, but did maintain that it was unlikely at her age. The reason for the constipation was actually the growth pressing on her colon.

What the surgeons actually found

The operation ended up producing a third version of events, now revealing that her left ovary held a fluid-filled cystic tumor of 25 centimeters. Her right ovary held a scattering of small solid masses. Since no surgeon takes both ovaries from a patient who only consented to losing one, the team removed the growths from each side instead, lifting out the large cystic tumor and bursting it right away.

While she was still on the table, a pathologist tested a sample and the result came back borderline: not cancer, but not benign either. Langlais was told there’s a 80% chance the disease returns, and that a recurrence would carry a high likelihood of being malignant. Because of that risk, the doctors want her eggs frozen, but she won’t need chemotherapy for now.

Langlais went in expecting to lose an ovary, but woke up learning she would probably need IVF (in vitro fertilization.) She posts updates on TikTok, and a community of other patients with the same problem are making it more manageable and less isolating.

What the research says about a “borderline” diagnosis

Borderline ovarian tumors occupy a strange middle ground, accounting for roughly 15% of epithelial ovarian cancers. (per Frontiers) They are usually caught at stage I about 80% of the time, and more than a third are found in women under 40. The odds of long-term survival are 95%% at five years and 90% at 10 for stages I through III.

Langlais’ age and conditions make her case rarer than the average patient, but she, for her part, has decided not dwell on it too much, not least of all because it’s all in a future that’s not here yet. “… I might have cancer in the future, I might become infertile. All this stuff that I could dwell on, but I really try not to,” she said.